Our film critics watch a lot of movies in a year. By December, their viewing slates span international standouts, festival favorites, studio blockbusters, and plenty more in between. Below, Justin Chang and Richard Brody take us through the year in film and rank the best offerings, two different ways.
A Brilliant Year for Movies and a Terrible One for Almost Everything Else
JUSTIN CHANG
One of the most emotionally overwhelming scenes in any new movie this year takes place at a New Year’s Eve party. Partway through Julia Loktev’s enthralling documentary, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow,” we find ourselves at a gathering of several Russian independent journalists, toasting the end of a truly hellish 2021 (“To a new year without Putin!”). They huddle around a TV and watch a compilation of video clips from various friends and fellow-travellers (journalists, activists, human-rights workers, election watchdogs, and more), who unleash a welcome flood of encouraging messages: “It wasn’t an easy year”; “We expected it to be bad, but it turned out even worse”; “Hell is breaking loose”; “But it’s O.K., somehow we survived”; “The solidarity of young people amazes me”; “Remember, any catastrophe can be turned into a step forward”; “Everything changes. We have to remember that it changes thanks to us”; “Friends, breathe deeper. Reboot yourselves”; “Evil is not eternal, and truth will surely win.”
2022, of course, does not turn out to be a year without Putin. In February, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will begin, forcing Loktev’s journalist-subjects, who have already been stigmatized by the government for doing their jobs, to flee the country altogether—a crisis that registers onscreen with an almost unbearable suspense. Movies have a curious ability to not only build and amplify tension but also to preserve it for future viewings. Nearly four years of war have passed since that defiantly hopeful New Year’s Eve, and yet, to watch Loktev’s film at this moment is to feel its urgency as if it had been filmed yesterday—and to be warmed by the collective spirit behind those heartfelt messages of strength and courage, even if the times have only gotten darker since they were spoken. Needless to say, those messages are hardly applicable to the Russian opposition movement alone. For any American feeling benumbed into hopelessness by the first year of the second Trump Administration—including its ongoing assaults on the practitioners and, indeed, the very notion of a free press—the time to watch and take heart from this brave, brilliant movie is surely now.
Several of the films on my best-of-the-year list, including “Last Air in Moscow,” are fundamentally timeless expressions and explorations of solidarity. They take us inside authoritarian crackdowns, debate the ways and means of dissidence, and weigh the physical and ethical costs of retributive violence. Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” a searing moral thriller about a group of Iranian former political prisoners who are granted a once-in-a-lifetime chance to avenge themselves, felt indelibly in conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” about an underground revolutionary movement in tatters, trying to survive long enough to fight and sometimes kill another day. In both these films—and also in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” in which the war for Brazil’s political soul, then and now, is also shown to be one battle after another—the characters cannot outrun the wounds, scars, and fatal missteps of the past. They must confront them head on, and not only for themselves but for the future generations who will inherit and, perhaps, ameliorate their struggles.
Questions of moral and political legacy crept up even in the context of a crackerjack entertainment like “Wake Up Dead Man,” the latest “Knives Out” mystery from the director and screenwriter Rian Johnson. This one takes place in and around a Catholic parish in upstate New York, and what’s bracing about the movie is the way it deploys the usual panoply of detective-story conventions—and the crucial character of an earnest priest (Josh O’Connor), making a radical argument for the eternal power and relevance of Christ’s love—to mount an ingenious reclamation of Christianity from the political right. If you want to gauge the full measure of O’Connor’s range as an actor, do seek out his very different performance in Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” in which he plays a harebrained thief with no convictions to speak of. Reichardt’s film, pointedly set against the Vietnam War protests of 1970, delivers its own off-center ode to political solidarity; in the margins of her story, Reichardt quietly reveals the grim consequences of standing for no one and nothing besides one’s own interests.
More than once, 2025 has struck me as a brilliant, dazzling year for movies and a terrible one for damn near everything else. Perhaps my working life as a critic has conditioned me into such a response; the movies have long been not just my cultural sustenance but also a personal wellspring of sanity. I don’t know how to reconcile my unfashionable optimism about the state of the medium—my sense that I saw more good and even great movies this year, from all over the world, than I have in any year since the pandemic—with the dismal box-office reports, the rumors of impending studio mergers, and various other doomsday laments that have dominated Hollywood headlines. As we prepare to ring in a new year of moviegoing, the best encouragement I can offer is to shrug and note that art finds a way.
Solidarity being the central though hardly the only theme, I have, in continuation of a long-standing personal tradition, ranked my favorite films of the year as a series of annotated pairings, plus one trio. In the interest of spreading the wealth and honoring the spirit of 2025, my list comprises twenty-five films, plus a handful of honorable mentions.
1. “Sirāt” and 2. “One Battle After Another”
The two best movies I saw this year both unfold under a cloud of doomy portent: as the world burns, a father searches for his missing daughter across a vast and unyielding landscape. In Oliver Laxe’s visually and sonically overwhelming survival thriller, “Sirāt,” the father is played by Sergi López, and the journey he embarks upon, in the improbable company of several desert ravers, is one of unfathomable shock and tragedy. But the movie isn’t a cheaply cynical or nihilistic experience; its gravest horrors spring from a complex understanding of how human compassion persists in a universe that is fundamentally opposed to its existence. Improbable acts of kindness and solidarity also power Paul Thomas Anderson’s political chase thriller “One Battle After Another,” which laughs impudently—and entertains generously—in the face of a police-state nightmare overseen by white-supremacist grotesques. The dad is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, doing his best and, not coincidentally, funniest work since “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013).
3. “Caught by the Tides” and 4. “Resurrection”
Two Chinese filmmakers, one a middle-aged master and the other a prodigious young upstart, gave us the two most formally audacious features of the year. In “Caught by the Tides,” Jia Zhangke weaves two decades’ worth of footage from his personal archive—some of it cleverly repurposed, some of it strikingly new—into an emotionally turbulent romantic drama of missed connections, thwarted longings, and unexpected beginnings. In “Resurrection,” the romance is with the cinema itself: Bi Gan draws us into a surreal labyrinth of stories, genres, and styles, with a dexterous and imaginative potted history of the medium playing out in the shadows. Both filmmakers, notably, salute the silent era: Bi through witty homages to F. W. Murnau and the Lumière brothers, Jia by coaxing forth an aching, wordless performance from his longtime collaborator Zhao Tao. In the century-old moment of cinema’s birth, these artists see the possibility of a grand reawakening.
5. “My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow” and 6. “The Secret Agent”
The brave independent journalists we meet in Julia Loktev’s extraordinarily tenacious documentary “My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow” have been classified as “foreign agents” by Vladimir Putin’s regime—a designation that makes it all the harder for them to do their jobs, especially in the awful months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In “The Secret Agent,” Kleber Mendonça Filho’s emotionally overflowing chronicle of life under Brazil’s military dictatorship, the protagonist (Wagner Moura, in the year’s most magnetic star turn) is not a secret agent at all, but he is forced to behave like one simply in order to survive. Patience is the name of the game here, for the characters we meet and the filmmakers behind the camera: Mendonça’s film ranges far and wide, so justly taken with the richness of its own human canvas that it’s in no hurry to piece its story together. Loktev’s epic, unfolding in five equally gripping parts, is the work of a filmmaker fearlessly following an unpredictable yarn wherever it takes her. (She’s still following it even now; what happens next will be revealed in “My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile.”)
7. “Sound of Falling,” 8. “April,” and 9. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”
The abuse and suppression of women’s bodies, a constant the world over, takes especially insidious root in a northern German farmstead, the setting of Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling”; a rural stretch of eastern Georgia, where Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “April” unfolds; and a middle-class Zambian suburb, in Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.” All three of these films are second features, directed with startling assurance and a willingness to shatter conventional boundaries of narrative time and space—to create formal ruptures and patterns born of the women’s shared experiences of trauma. In “Sound of Falling,” the camera could well be wielded by ghosts, haunting the same set of rooms across generations. In “April,” a mysteriously suffering creature wanders a gloomy landscape, bearing burdens that make it all but impossible for her to breathe. And, on a more hopeful note, in “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” a woman is symbolically transfigured into the bird of the film’s title, a creature known for its ruthlessly protective instincts.
10. “It Was Just an Accident” and 11. “Cloud”
The two purest thrillers of the year both propose that vigilantism, even if it isn’t the answer, can be wielded in service of important questions. In Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a group of former prisoners seek retribution against the man who tortured them behind bars—a scenario loosely yet forcefully informed by Panahi’s own past detention by the Iranian government, and infused with an anger so righteously intense that it could burn a hole in the screen. (Earlier this week, Panahi, who has been in the U.S. promoting the film, was sentenced in absentia by a court in Tehran to a year in prison and given a two-year travel ban.) In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud,” several armed and disgruntled men team up online to eliminate a common nemesis; it’s a chilling study in what life on the internet has wrought, from cutthroat business practices to recreational murder. Both films are built around the same disquieting takeaway: revenge is a dish best served not just cold but with as little hesitation as possible.
12. “Blue Moon” and 13. “Who by Fire”
Leaving aside their popular song-inspired titles, “Blue Moon,” Richard Linklater’s lovingly acerbic portrait of the lyricist Lorenz Hart (an outstanding Ethan Hawke), and “Who by Fire,” Philippe Lesage’s blistering drama about a group vacation from hell, are the year’s two most incisively detailed portraits of the fraught and complicated relationships that can develop between artists. In each film, two men who were once close friends and creative partners have an awkwardly passive-aggressive reunion, awakening inextricably bound feelings of affection, resentment, competitiveness, and begrudging camaraderie. And as the aftermath plays out, a new generation of aspiring artists is quietly watching—and learning.
14. “Marty Supreme” and 15. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
The cinema of non-stop nail-biting has found two terrific new standard-bearers—and produced two of the year’s most vigorously sustained leading performances. In Josh Safdie’s globe-trotting nineteen-fifties comedy, “Marty Supreme,” Timothée Chalamet is, like the New York table-tennis whiz he plays, a man in the dogged and unapologetic pursuit of greatness. In Mary Bronstein’s hyper-adrenalized domestic-horror movie, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” Rose Byrne scales dizzying new heights of maternal anxiety as a Montauk therapist who has long since reached the end of her tether. The two movies share a producer, Ronald Bronstein (husband of Mary), who also co-wrote and edited “Marty Supreme.” They also both possess a darkly exhilarating momentum, an almost competitive refusal to let their protagonists’ energies go unmatched.
16. “The Mastermind” and 17. “No Other Choice”
An unemployed husband and father decides to seize control of a dire situation, only to make things direr still. So begins Kelly Reichardt’s exquisitely crafted art-heist film, “The Mastermind,” starring Josh O’Connor—in the most sneakily trenchant of his four major performances this year—as a privileged fuckup with delusions of criminal grandeur. So, too, begins Park Chan-wook’s gleefully rambunctious anti-corporate murder farce, “No Other Choice,” in which Lee Byung-hun, unleashing an exuberant slapstick energy, becomes a bumbling crook for the ages.
18. “Sorry, Baby” and 19. “Souleymane’s Story”
In one of many gemlike scenes in “Sorry, Baby,” a young English-literature professor (Eva Victor, making a terrific feature début as writer, director, and actor) is questioned on a jury panel about whether she’s ever been the victim of a crime. Toward the end of Boris Lojkine’s heartbreaking immigrant drama, “Souleymane’s Story,” an undocumented Guinean laborer (Abou Sangaré) in Paris submits to an in-person interview during his quest for asylum. Here are two perfectly observed, exactingly empathetic character studies, both concerned with questions of what we owe the law and what the law owes us, and both firm in the conviction that a person’s story is theirs to tell and no one else’s.
20. “Black Bag” and 21. “Presence”
Richard Linklater had one of the great double bills of 2025 (see Nos. 12 and 25 on this list). The director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp had another with “Black Bag,” a delectably witty espionage thriller with a slippery yet sincere marital drama at its core, and “Presence,” a formally ingenious ghost story that doubles as a chronicle of family dysfunction. Both films are ultimately home-invasion thrillers of a sort, in which the precise nature of the invasion, and the motives of the invader(s), remain a mystery until the final moments. They confirm Soderbergh and Koepp as one of the nimblest and most reliable creative partnerships at work anywhere in the vicinity of Hollywood today.
22. “Misericordia” and 23. “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”
Suspicious priests, wacky confessions, unexplained disappearances, grisly murders: such is the terrain of “Misericordia,” Alain Guiraudie’s hilariously deadpan thriller about a prodigal sociopath, and “Wake Up Dead Man,” Rian Johnson’s intricately constructed parochial whodunnit. Guiraudie’s film may ultimately be the richer, wilder, less orthodox entertainment, but Johnson’s inspired puzzle-making, here and in his two previous “Knives Out” mysteries, remains a welcome throwback pleasure indeed.
24. “Sinners” and 25. “Nouvelle Vague”
Hear me out: “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s rigorously imagined thriller-fantasy set during the era of Jim Crow, and “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s rigorously researched comedy about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” are the year’s two most exacting studies in let’s-put-on-a-show entrepreneurship, in which a band of outsiders join together in scrappy pursuit of creative principles that defy the commercial norms of their era. Coogler shows what it takes to open a juke joint; Linklater unpacks what it takes to make a Jean-Luc joint. “Sinners” culminates in a showdown with bloodthirsty vampires; “Nouvelle Vague,” for some, is a curious exercise in vampirism, crowned by Guillaume Marbeck’s uncanny embodiment of Godard’s cool—a performance that practically flirts with bodily possession.
Honorable mentions
“28 Years Later,” “Below the Clouds,” “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions,” “Cover-Up,” “Eephus,” “Father Mother Sister Brother,” “Grand Tour,” “Is This Thing On?,” “The Love That Remains,” “Magellan,” “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” “The Shrouds,” “Warfare,” and “Weapons.”
The Year’s Best Movies Are Reflections, Assertions, and Expansions of the Art
RICHARD BRODY
Last year at this time, an expanded cinema dominated local movie theatres, introducing spectacular cinematic forms—the point-of-view shots in “Nickel Boys,” the fragmented narrative of “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point”—that lost none of their abstract wonders when seen on small screens at home. This year’s movies have been different: the best of them have brought old-fashioned, sensory spectacle back to the movies, albeit in new ways. Movies as immediately eye-catching attractions, built to thrill with size and scale and scope, follow in a venerable tradition of enticing viewers to movie theatres for experiences inaccessible via home viewing. In this regard, the makers of some of the year’s most substantial films are reproducing razzle-dazzle strategies that, in recent times, have largely been the province of commerce-striving blockbusters. That effort has a historical precedent: in the nineteen-fifties, Hollywood juiced movies with such techniques as widescreen images, stereo sound, and 3-D effects, in order to offer moviegoers what a rapidly ascending source of home entertainment—television—could not.
The economic rationale is obvious: ticket sales are still a major source of revenue for movies. But what’s fascinating is that many of the year’s best movies, even ones made by streaming services and given only nominal theatrical releases—such as “Hedda” and “Highest 2 Lowest”—share the spectacular dimension. What the immensity and the sensory intensity of these movies evoke is something of a paradox: not fantasy or distraction but a confrontation with the power dynamics of public life. It takes more than money to create such extravaganzas, and, with these movies, the additional elements show. Along with their physical splendor, the films in question embody the conflict-riddled abstractions—companies and contracts, laws and institutions—on which they depend.
This year’s best movies feel plugged in, inextricably connected to forces bigger than the ordinary faces of local and private authority—and confrontationally so, with a sense of danger and urgency amid forms of pressure that are all the more terrifying for acting invisibly and inexorably. In other words, these movies are all political thrillers—some of them literally so, with stories that overtly involve governmental actions. Others, whose stories merely suggest a political perspective, are no less energized by it. In all, the usual cinematic run of crime and evasion, desperate measures and paranoid obsessions, reverberate with a specific sense of playing for more than a payday or a romance. The films belong to history at large.
Spectacular cinema, regardless of substance or commercial appeal, places special artistic demands on directors, for the simple reason that it involves events and actions beyond the daily purview. Extraordinary subjects call for extraordinary styles, which is why this year’s best films offer the special thrills of aesthetic tours de force pulled off with flair. That’s also why there’s something especially disheartening about mediocrity on a grand scale, as with the glut of overproduced, overblown franchise films, which lack both personalized imagination and the more modest virtue of clear observation.
Last month, the industry analyst Richard Rushfield noted that “suddenly, Hollywood isn’t making dramatic films anymore,” and did some box-office analysis demonstrating both the dearth of drama (defined loosely as earnest realism) and its lack of commercial success. But he also noted that the genre still thrives—on TV. The success of drama in TV-series form suggests that it’s actually wrong to blame the box office for the waning of the genre on the big screen. What has doomed movie dramas is, instead, their aesthetic (or lack thereof). Because their basic concern is with psychology and messaging, screenplays dominate and the direction is often merely functional, as it also tends to be on TV (because of the script-driven demands of showrunning) and with franchise films (because of domineering studios). Even independent dramatic features made without overbearing producers are often directed no more originally than ones made for TV. That’s the artistic hazard of realism: the filming of ordinary life in realistic ways defaults to inconspicuous and modest styles.
This isn’t just a problem for Hollywood and independent filmmakers. It has long been an issue in international filmmaking, intensifying in recent years. Because of economic difficulties in national film industries (whether a matter of box-office or of financing) international co-productions have proliferated, and these often yield a blandly homogenized international style. Alternatively, sometimes the quest to reach world markets by way of film-festival acclaim gives rise to the opposite—to big swings and big misses, the kind of festival films that, by ambition, idiosyncrasy, and length, cut through the clamor but exude affectation and effortfulness. (Such flashy methods also often elide substance in favor of hand-waving generalities and coy silences, as in such recent releases as “Sirāt” and “Sound of Falling.”)
In other words, festival darlings, from here or elsewhere, frequently offer borrowed styles, modelling themselves either on commercial successes or on succès d’estime and providing little in the way of an immediate and first-person reckoning with cinematic form. This, above all, is what’s at stake in the year’s exciting spate of self-aware cinematic spectacles. In their confrontations with power, the year’s best films also confront the artistic power of the cinema itself. Their spectacular aspect neither diminishes nor merely adorns their subjects; the challenge that this year’s best films meet is to develop copious texts, energetic dramas, and substantial ideas by way of a turn to the image, by attention to the “how” and the “why” of movies. The year’s best movies are reflections, assertions, and expansions of the art of the cinema itself, at a time when the art form is under siege from its small-screen rivals.
1. “Sinners”
The dazzling virtuosity with which Ryan Coogler meets the technical challenge of casting Michael B. Jordan in the dual role of identical twins is matched by the conceptual audacity of this historical drama, set in rural Mississippi in 1932, and centered on the essence of the blues and the music’s colossal reach—emotional, cultural, political, economic, and even metaphysical. The twins, returning home after enriching themselves in gangland Chicago, open a juke joint and hire a young prodigy and an esteemed elder to perform there. By raising their music to new local prominence, they unintentionally attract cosmic predators (vampires!) who hope to lay hold of it. Coogler melds a richly detailed social background—a vision of the inescapable violence of the Jim Crow era—with the overwhelming romanticism of love and lust under fire.
2. “The Mastermind”
Setting this drama of a quick heist and its long aftermath in 1970, amid nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and Nixonian efforts to repress dissent, Kelly Reichardt extracts a criminal scheme from the petty realm of profit and recognizes it as desperate, blundering existential revolt. Josh O’Connor plays the titular planner, an out-of-work cabinetmaker at odds with his suburban comforts and the vague constraints of ordinary life, who devises a plan to steal paintings from a museum and thereby launches himself into extraordinary adventures—comedic, melancholy, calamitous—that mesh ever tighter with the political conflicts of the day.
3. “The Secret Agent”
The mind-bending pressures of political persecution under an authoritarian regime are merely the premise for the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ample, turbulent, propulsively energetic, and ferociously principled drama, set in 1977, while the country was ruled by a military dictatorship. Wagner Moura brings taut control and thoughtful dynamism to the role of a scientist driven into hiding by legal and extralegal threats. Mendonça centers the expressively written, finely observed story on the safe house where the scientist is harbored and exalts his extended community of secret sympathizers while also contemplating in unflinching detail the crude malevolence of his persecutors.
4. “The Phoenician Scheme”
Wes Anderson’s films are always plugged in, or, at least, have been so since “Moonrise Kingdom.” With the highest degree of fantasy, he approaches political life with a blend of hands-on conflict and philosophical abstraction, and in this movie he pursues the tendency to distant extremes, viewing international tycoonery and industrial modernization amid espionage, imperialism, and revolt—and also amid family conflict. As ever, Anderson’s hyper-ornamental style is a crucially substantial embodiment of power. Here, that power is also domestic: this is one of the year’s many films in which a father-daughter bond is the engine of drama.
5. “Hedda”
Nia DaCosta supercharges Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” by expanding its setting to the hermetic majesty of a lavish country estate and the overheated whirl of a welcome-home party for the heroine and her overtaxed husband, and by making her purple past dominate the present tense. The film also brings the intellectual achievement at the play’s center—an academic manuscript—to passionate dramatic life. Here, the action takes place in nineteen-fifties England, Hedda (Tessa Thompson) is Black, and the scholar who was Hedda’s former lover is a woman (Nina Hoss). DaCosta rightly finds Ibsen capacious enough for dramatic and cultural possibilities far beyond his immediate purview—apt tribute, both faithful and free, from one artist to another.
6. “Afternoons of Solitude”
Sixty-five-plus years of lightweight synch-sound cameras—and, then, compact video equipment—have turned observational documentaries into a cliché in constant need of reimagination. Few filmmakers do so as comprehensively as Albert Serra does, with a subject that demands an especially wary form of observation: bullfighting. The result is a rigorous, unflinching view of mortal showdowns ravishingly stylized. The film follows a single torero through a year and a half of bouts, showing behind-the-scenes preparation and after-the-battle medical care and emotional decompression—but it’s dominated by the dangers of the corrida, and Serra, needing to find a method for seeing closely but from safely afar, invents an aesthetic to go with it.
7. “Highest 2 Lowest”
Spike Lee’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” is better than the original because it filters out the police-procedural sidetrack and endows the story with a substantial and provocative blast of cultural politics. Lee sets it in Brooklyn—where else?—but in a sleek and posh new waterfront high-rise. The protagonist, played by Denzel Washington, is a music executive who must ransom the kidnapped teen-age son of his longtime friend, and whose rescue effort brings him deep into the world of hip-hop, which he once boosted and now disdains. The visual swing, confrontational dialogue, and wide-world stakes expand Lee’s cinematic universe into strange new turf.
7½. “This Life of Mine”
For her last film, Sophie Fillières, who knew that she was terminally ill while making it, ran to the end of a path she’d long been following and leaped into the void. The inhibitions and idiosyncrasies on the basis of which she crafted her protagonists in more than two decades of filmmaking are here expanded to transcendental adventure. Agnès Jaoui—starring as a poet who works at an ad agency where she no longer fits in, grabs avidly but awkwardly at a new life, and then gets sick—invests every impulse and hesitation, every exclamation point and question mark in Fillières’s script, with a self-affirming lilt of liberation. (This film, released in France in 2024, is still unreleased in the U.S.)
8. “Misericordia”
Alain Guiraudie, who has for decades explored the emotional and social dimensions of gay life in rural France, crafts an erotic thriller that’s also a murder mystery, albeit one of a distinctive and inventive sort. A thirtysomething baker returns to a small town for the funeral of his mentor, a man with whom he had been secretly in love. He’s welcomed into the household by the mentor’s widow, and, when that couple’s adult son vanishes, he comes under suspicion. While unfolding the investigation, Guiraudie also finds the town seething with stifled lust that’s ready to burst out volcanically—and that’s inseparable from the natural mystery and wonder of country life.
9. “One Battle After Another”
The lucidity and directness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s premise—revolution is a thrilling and ruinous myth, community organization is comparatively dull but urgently helpful—is this year’s cinematic purloined letter, too obvious to be acknowledged, especially by those who either share in the myth or decry it as reality. Much of the movie is a muddle of tone, with scattershot antics and tossed-off themes amid scenes and moments of immense power. On the other hand, its grand and deft action scenes are balanced by breathtakingly exquisite pinpoint observations: one of the year’s great cinematic touches is a small rug rolling itself back automatically, by design, to conceal a secret escape hatch.
10. “Marty Supreme”
This hectic and violent, romantic and antic drama, set in 1952 and freely adapted from the life of the table-tennis champion Marty Reisman, stars Timothée Chalamet as a fast-talking, shamelessly self-serving, recklessly self-confident young star of the game whose schemes propel him far from his Lower East Side beginnings—into the city’s high-culture cloisters, the criminal underworld, and the realm of international diplomacy. As directed by Josh Safdie (who wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein), the tale lurches wildly through a series of tense adventures that defy logic and prudence, as Marty himself does, in favor of experience and excitement—and that fill the screen with a tangy array of brazen, willful characters who put up a good fight.
11. “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon”
The accidental diptych offered this year by Richard Linklater, of two artists—the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on his way up and the songwriter Lorenz Hart on his way out—also offers contrasting dramatic styles that suggest the polar extremes of bio-pics. “Nouvelle Vague,” about the making of Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” is a hedgehog movie, defining Godard by the ideas that emerge from his working life with his cast, his crew, and his fellow-filmmakers; it’s a marvel of impersonation. In “Blue Moon,” Linklater’s vision of Hart is personal and fox-like, an intimate portrait of him at a bar as he dispenses glittering aphorisms of lifeworn wisdom in the face of professional and romantic disasters—a marvel of incarnation.
12. “Eephus”
For his first feature, Carson Lund developed a daring premise, telling the story of a single baseball game—in a New England adult-recreational league, some time in the nineteen-nineties, on a field that’s about to be erased by the construction of a school—from the time that the players approach the field to the time that they leave it. Lund keeps the action tethered to the site, ranging no farther than the dugouts, the woods beyond the outfield, and the nearest street. From this challenge, Lund provides a pointillistic group portrait of idiosyncratic characters, parses the sport’s action with a singularly analytical yet subjective eye, and expands the melancholy of farewells to symphonic dimensions.
13. “Peter Hujar’s Day”
From the amazing but narrow premise of reënacting a 1974 interview of the photographer Peter Hujar by the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, Ira Sachs develops a mighty and vivid portrait of an era and a milieu—and a memorial for Hujar himself, who died in 1987, of aids. The subject of the conversation is what Hujar did in the previous day. The movie has only two actors, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, but their performances are more than merely precise and expressive—they’re evocative, and what they evoke is the people under discussion, such as Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg. The movie conjures them all, bringing these personalities to the mind’s eye as vividly as if they were physically filmed as characters.
14. “Invention”
In a year of father-and-daughter movies, it’s refreshing to see this boldly accomplished daughter-and-father movie, from the woman’s point of view—one that’s sharpened and amplified by its blend of fiction and nonfiction. It’s made jointly by Courtney Stephens, who directed, and Callie Hernandez, who co-wrote it and plays Carrie Fernandez, who travels to a rural Massachusetts town to claim the ashes of her late father and gets entangled in the economic, social, and supernatural mysteries surrounding a dubious medical invention that he’d tried to market. With observational precision and unhinged dialogue, the filmmakers traverse the wilds of conspiracies and frauds to discern mighty and enduring connections of nature and culture.
15. “The Fishing Place”
The veteran American independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza, filming for the second time in Norway, here probes the country’s history in a drama set during its occupation by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. A Norwegian woman who’s installed as the housekeeper for a German émigré priest in exile gets caught in a tangle of conflicting loyalties and high-stakes maneuvers. The movie is a series of intimate confrontations, public and private, which Tregenza—doing his own virtuosic cinematography—films in monumentally extended shots, mounting the camera on a crane that he wields like a paintbrush that ultimately pivots toward his own activity in one of the boldest and strangest of recent reflexive twists.
16. “This Woman”
This first feature by Alan Zhang, which she co-wrote with Hihi Lee, builds a shifting interplay of fiction and nonfiction into the melodramatic story of a young woman in Beijing named Beibei, a real-estate agent who gets drawn ever closer, albeit platonically, to a male colleague whose wife lashes out threateningly. Burdened with family obligations, Beibei needs money and takes increasingly desperate measures to get it—then the pandemic freezes her life in place. With coolly passionate images, frankly declarative dialogue, and interludes in the form of interviews, Zhang discerningly sees through the characters’ immediate troubles to the pressures imposed by Chinese society at large.
17. “The Empire”
On a decade-plus roll since the self-reinventive inspirations of “Li’l Quinquin,” Bruno Dumont extends that local epic to cosmic dimensions in a “Star Wars” parody set on France’s rugged northern coast. With a story of secret cabals and a child born to rule, Dumont projects the nasty prejudices and bureaucratic rigors of local politics, the tangles of family allegiances, and the tender grunge of young lust into divine and diabolical clashes run from celestial and subterranean castles. The result is as outrageous and uproarious as it is visionary.
18. “Fire of Wind”
The Portuguese director Marta Mateus’s first feature, baring layers of history and legend beneath local events, is set in a vineyard where laborers, menaced by a bull that gets free—or perhaps has been unleashed against them—take refuge high in the estate’s trees. There, they tell stories of their lives and the difficulties and deprivations that they’ve long endured, including ones involving war and persecution. The cast features nonprofessional actors drawn from the area; their declamatory style of performance, along with Mateus’s hieratic images, endow the movie’s dramatic realism with the power of myth.
19. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”
The Zambian-born British director Rungano Nyoni sets this drama in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, where a young woman who has recently returned home from Europe for a family visit chances, on a late-night drive, to find a corpse in the road: her uncle. In the resulting turmoil, female relatives voice accusations that he had sexually assaulted them. As family secrets emerge, the protagonist is outraged to discover the prevalence of sexual predation—along with the power of patriarchal institutions and a code of silence to protect the predators. Nyoni films with a keen-edged clarity while finding in daily life a rich array of symbols ready to release their explosive meaning.
20. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Mary Bronstein, in her second feature, captures fury under pressure with as distinctive a tone and a style, and as unusual a realm of sympathies, as she did in her first, “Yeast.” In the story of a mother whose chronically ill daughter requires exceptional attention and whose husband, a sea captain, is away for long stretches, Bronstein discovers new and nerve-shredding ways to compose and deploy closeups, turns casual encounters into emotionally violent crises, and—amid intense visual identification with the protagonist (incarnated with red-hot energy by Rose Byrne)—doesn’t hesitate to consider in context the calmer virtues of forethought and reason.
As a general rule, documentaries should be judged no differently from fiction films. But, in this year of foregrounded spectacle, the rule is hard to keep to. The best of this year’s many excellent nonfiction films are no less worthy than the year’s fictions, but it’s essentially impossible to rank comparatively across the two categories. So I’m putting them on their own here: “Suburban Fury,” “Life After,” “Pavements,” “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” “Zodiac Killer Project,” “Carol & Joy.” ♦
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